We Can Solve the Construction Safety Crisis
- By Jerry Laws
- Aug 01, 2008
Participants in a June 24 congressional
hearing offered all sorts of
solutions to the crisis in U.S. construction
safety.
The only witness who offered
none at all was OSHA’s
leader, Edwin Foulke Jr.
Foulke fielded nearly all
of the questions when members
of the U.S.House Education
and Labor Committee
and an invited
congresswoman, Shelley
Berkley, D-Nev., asked their
questions. But he wasn’t the
sole witness that morning;
the other panelists were
Mark Ayers, president of the
AFL-CIO’s Building and
Construction Trades Department;
George Cole, a
42-year ironworker whose
brother-in-law died Oct. 5,
2007, in a fall at the Las Vegas CityCenter
project, a mammoth downtown site where
six workers have died on the job so far;
Mike Kallmeyer, senior VP of construction
services for Denier Electric of Columbus,
Ohio; and Robert LiMandri, acting building
commissioner for New York City. The
four said more enforcement, more standards,
more training, and more emphasis
on construction could curb the crane collapses,
falls, and other incidents that are
claiming an average of four construction
workers’ lives every day. Foulke couldn’t
promise any of that and said OSHA’s training,
inspection, and penalty numbers
demonstrate it is doing a good job.
The specific recommendations surely
would make a difference. They won’t come
about during this administration, but they’re
a good starting point for the next one:
• Finish the Cranes & Derricks negotiated
rule, which has been in process for five
years, and put it into effect.
• Allow OSHA inspectors
to issue stop-work orders
when they witness a
• Install “black box”
technology and labels on
tower crane components so
they can be tracked as they
are moved from site to site.
Update federal guidelines for
these cranes.
• Create a Construction
Safety & Health Administration,
similar to MSHA
and similarly separate from
OSHA.
• Mandate 10-hour
OSHA training for all construction
workers nationwide.
• Give NIOSH more money for construction
safety research.
• Stop reducing or eliminating penalties
issued to employers, and stop giving this financial
relief in meetings from which victims’
representatives are excluded. See
whether federal OSHA can influence state
plans to also use this tougher approach.
• Address Hispanic construction workers’
safety more forcefully.
• Solve the problem of large-scale misclassification
of construction workers as independent
contractors. (Their injuries and
deaths don’t show up in BLS totals.)
This article originally appeared in the August 2008 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.
About the Author
Jerry Laws is Editor of Occupational Health & Safety magazine, which is owned by 1105 Media Inc.